MEN can have babies. That is a truth so universally acknowledged that to say otherwise is to be branded a transphobe or even a TERF, a ‘trans exclusionary radical feminist’. Men can probably be TERFs too – I’ll need to check the MANual.
Enough of that; there is a very serious side to all this. Last year the guidance given to midwifery students at a Scottish university was that some transgender birth-giving men (i.e. women) could still have intact male reproductive organs. Shurely shome mishtake, Mish Moneypenny! A transgender man (i.e. a woman) does not and never has had intact male reproductive organs.
While the midwifery lecturer (of unspecified gender) was clearly confused about male and female reproductive anatomy, the student midwives were not and leaked the guidance to the press. The guidance was later amended to say that ‘some men could give birth through a surgically constructed penis’. At this point words fail the faint-hearted, most of whom prefer not to think about a surgically constructed penis let alone pushing a baby out through one.
A recent article in Medscape, no stranger to these pages for its extreme Covid-orthodoxy, pro-masking and pro Covid-19 vaccine stance, tries to shed some light on the darkness surrounding the issue of men who give birth. In an update on ‘Pregnancy Outcomes in Transgender Men’, using all the latest woke newspeak gobbledegook that they can muster, we are helpfully informed that ‘only individuals who are assigned female at birth have a uterus are capable of pregnancy’. The word ‘female’ appears four times in the article, twice qualified as having been ‘assigned at birth’. In the same way, the word ‘women’ makes only two appearances and is qualified both times as ‘cisgender’ (i.e. not so mentally ill that they think they are men).
It gets worse. Health professionals in the front line of maternity care can help close the gap ‘between these patients and societal misconceptions surrounding transgender men who desire and experience pregnancy’. Which rather begs the question of why these women want to be men in the first place. Doctors and midwives need to remember that ‘many transmasculine individuals will still retain their uterus and are therefore capable of getting pregnant’ if they are involved in ‘penile-vaginal intercourse’. Let’s not go there!
However, full marks to Medscape for including the advice that ‘for patients seeking to become pregnant, testosterone must be discontinued. Testosterone is teratogenic; it can cause abnormal urogenital development in the female foetus and should be avoided even prior to conception’. I say ‘full marks’ because this sound advice has just been contradicted by a group of sociologists who, funded by a £500,000 UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) research grant, have concluded that ‘pregnant transmen shouldn’t be pressured to stop taking testosterone despite the risks it poses to babies’.
Naturally this advice has been greeted with horror by some in the NHS and in the USA where one bioethicist described the advice as ‘insane’. But the ‘experts’ concluded that ‘current advice centres too heavily on preventing babies from developing birth defects’. This is simply a restatement of the pro-abortion lobby’s view that the rights of the (wo)man outweigh those of the foetus. So what if a female baby is born infertile and incontinent? Surely a small price to pay compared with the happiness and empowerment of the crazy woman who thinks she is a man but wants to have a baby.
We could make this stuff up, but why bother when reality is more insane than any sane person could invent?
